Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down after 14 years

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, announced in a post on Facebook that, after 14 years, she’s stepping down from her position as its second-ranking executive but will retain a seat on the board. Sandberg will leave her post in the fall after spending the next few months working with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to transition her direct reports.

In a separate Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg called the change an “end of an era” and said that he doesn’t plan to replace Sandberg’s role in the company’s structure. This will further consolidate power of the company under his control, which he’s shared with Sandberg since she joined the company in 2008 to help its then-23-year-old CEO navigate the path to an IPO....

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Disgraced OpenSea engineer arrested for insider trading

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Former OpenSea product manager Nathaniel Chastain has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with an insider trading scheme. Chastain was arrested Wednesday morning in New York City and is expected to be presented in court later today.

Chastain was publicly accused of insider trading in September and fired from his position at OpenSea — but today’s indictment marks the first criminal charges associated with the scheme.

45 token purchases on 11 different occasions

While employed at OpenSea, Chastain was responsible for deciding which NFT collections would be featured on OpenSea’s front page, a distinction that typically made the collections skyrocket in value. The indictment describes a pattern of 45 token...

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Sonos is offering up to $180 off refurbished soundbars and smart speakers today

The Sonos Arc and other refurbished Sonos speakers are all on sale. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Everyone might be talking about the recent release of the Sonos Ray, but if Sonos’ entry-level soundbar doesn’t seem like a good fit, you can currently find discounts on a range of refurbished speakers in the Sonos catalog. Some of the current deal highlights include the Sonos Arc and Sonos Roam, which are available for $719 and $139, respectively.

The Sonos Arc normally sells for $900 new, but this refurbished model is available for $719. The Arc soundbar is perfect for anyone who wants to improve their home audio setup and offers a number of quality of life features in addition to an excellent sound profile. Like other Sonos soundbars, the Arc is compatible with Apple’s AirPlay 2, supports Google Assistant and Alexa, and is compatible...

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Twitter’s reportedly shifting teams away from Spaces, newsletters, and communities

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is pulling employees off of working on major consumer-facing features like audio Spaces, communities, and newsletters and instead plans to refocus their efforts on user growth and personalization, according to Bloomberg. The changes come as a pending buyout by Elon Musk is already casting a shadow on every move the company makes — and follows just weeks after Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced a pause on most hiring and fired both the company’s consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour and the leader on the revenue side, Bruce Falck. Bloomberg’s report reveals some of the restructuring happening within Twitter under the direction of Jay Sullivan, the new head of product and interim head of revenue.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a...

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Rampant spam has reportedly forced Google to turn off RCS ads in India

Users in India reported that Google Messages’ RCS ads feature was being abused. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google Messages users in India have reported receiving a deluge of unwanted ads in recent weeks using Rich Communication Services (RCS), and it seems Google has employed a response strategy: turn them all off. A Google spokesperson told Gadgets 360 that the company is “aware that some businesses are abusing our anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India,” and it would be “disabling this feature in India while we work with the industry to improve the experience for users.”

The ads in question were delivered by way of RCS’ business messaging feature, which allows verified businesses to send messages to customers that go beyond a typical text, with images and interactive features. Google pitches it as a way for brands...

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Diablo Immortal feels uncomfortably mercenary

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Diablo Immortal’s announcement upset a lot of fans of the franchise who felt a mobile version of their beloved game would come at the expense of a more traditional Diablo gaming experience. After a short time with the game ahead of its release on June 2nd (though the game has been rolling out early in some regions today), I found two things to be true. The first is that Blizzard has created a game that admirably captures the look and feel of a traditional Diablo game. The second is that Immortal is also a game designed to extract the most money out of its players.

From the couple hours I’ve played, the map is expansive with many different areas gated by level requirements and many places within those areas in which you can get up to all...

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Our Flag Means Death is setting sail for a heartbreaking season 2

Ed Teach caressing Stede Bonnet’s cheek, as a friend. | Image: HBO

Just in time for this year’s Pride Month, HBO has announced that Our Flag Means Deathwill return for a second season of stories about swashbuckling and love on the high seas. In a statement about Our Flag Means Death’s renewal, series creator David Jenkins expressed gratitude to the show’s fandom for its support and commitment to the unexpected romance at the center of the first season.

“We felt the show was special while we were making it, but fans’ open-armed embrace of the inhabitants of the Revenge makes heading into a second season all the more sweet,” Jenkins said. “Thanks to our team at HBO Max, our invested executive producers, and our wildly enthusiastic audience for making another voyage to this world possible.”

Our Flag Means...

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China-linked hackers are exploiting a new vulnerability in Microsoft Office

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft Office is already being exploited by hackers linked to the Chinese government, according to threat analysis research from security firm Proofpoint.

Details shared by Proofpoint on Twitter suggest that a hacking group labeled TA413 was using the vulnerability (named “Follina” by researchers) in malicious Word documents purported to be sent from the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government in exile based in Dharamsala, India. The TA413 group is an APT, or “advanced persistent threat,” actor believed to be linked to the Chinese government and has previously been observed targeting the Tibetan exile community.

In general, Chinese hackers have a history of using software security...

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GM is slashing prices for the Chevy Bolt amid high demand for electric vehicles

Photo by Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge

General Motors is slashing prices for the 2023 Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV amid high demand for electric vehicles. While other automakers are jacking up EV prices to account for rising commodity costs, GM says it wants to send the message that “affordability has always been a priority for these vehicles.”

Under the new pricing scheme, 2023 Bolt EVs with the 1LT trim will start at $26,595, which includes dealer freight charges. That’s down from the 2022 price of $32,495, reflecting an 18 percent drop. The 2LT trim, which includes leather seats, HD surround vision, and lane-change alert, starts at $29,795, a 16 percent decrease from the 2022 price of $35,695.

The 2023 Bolt EUV with the LT trim starts at $28,195, also including dealer...

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More Star Wars: Visions and a new Tales of the Jedi prequel anthology are on the way

A group of Togruta. | Image: Lucasfilm

While live-action announcements grabbed most of the attention during this year’s Star Wars Celebration, the event came to a close with more than a handful of new developments on the animation front that are set to broaden the Star Wars canon in the near future.

Though most of the news out of this year’s Celebration was focused on stories about the adult heroes and villains who’ll be duking it out across Star Wars’ history, the conversation turned toward younglings on Friday as Michael Olson and the rest of the creative team behind Disney Plus and Disney Junior’s Young Jedi Adventures revealed some early details about the upcoming project. Set during Star Wars’ High Republic era, Young Jedi Adventures — due out in spring 2023 — will...

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Extreme drought could cost California half its hydroelectric power this summer

The Hyatt Powerplant at Lake Oroville during drought conditions in Oroville, California, on Monday, February 14th, 2022. | Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Drought is forecast to slash California’s supply of hydroelectricity in half this summer. That’s bad news for residents’ air quality and utility bills, the US Energy and Information Administration (EIA) said in its forecast. The state will likely lean on more expensive, polluting natural gas to make up for the shortfall in hydropower.

Nearly 60 percent of California is currently coping with “extreme” drought or worse, according to the national drought monitor map. California’s current water woes stem from low levels of snowpack, which quenches the state’s reservoirs when it melts. In early April, when snowpack usually peaks, the water content of the state’s snowpack was 40 percent lower than the normal levels over the past 30 years.

...

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Some of our favorite iRobot Roomba vacuums are up to $200 off

The Roomba j7 Plus and its auto-emptying station. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

If you’re late on your spring cleaning, now is the perfect time to play catchup and save some money in the process. There are some great discounts running on Roomba smart vacuums from iRobot. These deals cover a couple of our favorite models, like the Roomba j7 and Roomba i3 EVO, both as standalone bots or with their respective auto-emptying stations. The discounts range from $100 to $200 off at a variety of retailers as well as directly from iRobot’s site, where the manufacturer indicates that the sale is running through June 18th.

For those looking to get the biggest savings on the best bot, the iRobot Roomba j7 and Roomba j7 Plus are both $200 off. The standalone vacuum normally runs $599, but it’s now $399 at Amazon, Best Buy, W...

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Google is combining Meet and Duo into a single app for voice and video calls

Meet is Google’s calling app of the future. | Image: Google

Google announced today that it’s combining two of its video-calling apps, Duo and Meet, into a single platform. Pretty soon, there will be only Google Meet, and Google’s hoping it can be the one calling app users need for just about everything in their lives.

By bringing them both together, Google’s hoping it can solve some of what ails modern communication tools. “What’s been really important is understanding how people make the choice as to what tool they’re going to use, for what purpose, in what circumstance,” says Javier Soltero, the head of Google Workspace. Our digital lives are filled with a million different chat apps, each with its own rules and norms and contact list, some for work purposes and some for personal ones. Google’s...

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Google TV app launches on iOS as another hub for your streaming services

Google TV on iOS is very similar to the Android experience. | Image: Google

The Google TV app, which aggregates content recommendations from numerous streaming services and lets you create a universal watchlist of your favorites, is now available on iOS. Google says that it’ll replace the previous Google Play Movies and TV app in the App Store, so if you’ve already got that installed, you should be able to update it to the Google TV experience sometime today.

The software, already available on Android, also allows you to rate what you’ve previously viewed to improve future recommendations. More important for Android TV or Chromecast with Google TV owners is that you can use the Google TV app as a remote control for those devices by tapping the remote icon.

Not every major streaming service allows its content...

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How YouTube built a better way to connect your TV and phone

Connecting your phone and TV makes things like shopping on YouTube much easier. | Image: YouTube

TV remotes suck, and YouTube is tired of dealing with them. “It’s very hard to type on TV with a remote,” says Brynn Evans, the head of design for YouTube on TV. “Like, the remote’s clunky, every remote’s different, there’s a million different buttons. They’re all bad.” Every app and service has tried to find ways around this, from those “activate on the web” screens that save you from typing your password to a heavy emphasis on voice search. Your Apple TV will practically beg you to type on your phone rather than with your remote. But even that’s not enough for YouTube.

So YouTube’s rolling out a new feature that more closely connects your phone to your TV. (It works on Android and iOS devices, so tablets should work too.) If you sit...

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Looking Glass might have just invented the GIF’s 3D successor

At the risk of confusion: this is a GIF of a Block. | Image by Nikki Chan / GIF by The Verge

On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images — or animated sequences of images — anywhere. The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes.

Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too.

“Imagine we’re in a parallel universe and every movie ever shot was shot in color, but every human being was watching in black and white,” says Looking Glass co-founder and CEO Shawn Frayne. “That’s the situation we’re in with 3D.”

He says that if you add up all the CG movies, video game screenshots, 3D models, and portrait mode photos — and, yes, NFTs — there are hundreds of trillions of pieces of...

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Focusrite debuts its audio interfaces designed for podcasters

Focusrite

Focusrite, the British manufacturer of audio interfaces and recording tools, is introducing a new line of devices designed for home podcast recording. The Vocaster One and Vocaster Two take the key parts of Focusrite’s popular interfaces and tailor them to amateur podcasters and other home audio creators.

Focusrite’s Scarlett line of audio interfaceshas been a consumer standard over the past few years for podcasters who need to plug XLR microphones into their computer (to the point where I saw one in the trailer for a movie about a podcast just last week). But even as it’s become a hit in the podcast world, Focusrite has mostly marketed itself as a company for musicians (the tagline on its website is “We believe in enriching peoples’...

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Discord adds text chat directly inside your voice channels

Discord’s Star Badger video is a Star Fox parody that shows how Text Chat in Voice Channels works. | Image: Discord

Discord is enabling a new dedicated text chat feature for voice channels. Users of the platform can take advantage of the new feature, aptly named Text Chat in Voice Channels, by clicking on a new chat bubble icon for the voice channel they are participating in. The feature is a welcome quality of life change, similar to the chat window in Zoom calls that many are used to in this day and age.

All non-community servers have Text Chat in Voice Channels enabled by default, while servers that have community enabled (under Server Settings > Community) have a period of time to either opt in or disable it from ever going live. If no action is taken, the feature will enable automatically on all servers by June 15th.

Image:...

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The TweetDeck Mac app will go away on July 1st

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Just a few months after Twitter spent $40 million to acquire TweetDeck in 2011, it launched new HTML5 apps for the browser, Windows, and Mac. Now, with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter still looming, and an edit button incoming, the web browser version will be all that’s left. Twitter shut down TweetDeck’s Windows app in 2016, versions for iOS, Android, and Adobe Air went away in 2013, and now the Mac version is set to disappear after July 1st.

In a tweet, the team said the change is happening “to focus on making TweetDeck even better and testing our new Preview.” Twitter power users who use the app to monitor different feeds of information got the message via a banner notification this morning. Twitter has been publicly testing an...

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More PlayStation 5 consoles are coming to Walmart tomorrow

Fingers crossed for a summer rich in PS5 console availability. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

We’re still seeing short or no supply of PlayStation 5 consoles at many retailers and going weeks between new nationwide restocks. Hopefully, this summer will prove more fruitful, and a good (though small) sign is that Walmart has a PS5 event coming up tomorrow.

If you’re a Walmart Plus subscriber, you will have the chance to queue up for a standard $499 disc drive-equipped PlayStation 5 Thursday, June 2nd at 3PM ET. This is yet another restock that’s exclusive to paying Walmart Plus members, though, since we have advance notice, you have plenty of time to pay the minimum $12.95 for one month of membership ahead of the drop. Yes, you get other perks from Walmart, like free deliveries, but we’re ultimately just paying to play the restock...

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Sonos Ray review: a starter soundbar sort of stuck in the past

The Ray offers fantastic voice clarity and crisp sound, but this optical-only soundbar isn’t without frustrations

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Uvalde shows why online threats need to be taken more seriously

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A week ago today, an 18-year-old man walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and committed the latest in our nation’s never-ending series of senseless murders. And in the aftermath of that horror — 19 children dead, two teachers dead, 18 more injured — attention once again turned to what role platforms might have played in enabling the violence.

This question can feel both urgently necessary and also somehow beside the point. Necessary because people (often teenagers) are constantly being arrested after making threats on social media, and the Uvalde case shows once again why those threats must be taken more seriously.

And yet it’s also clear that America’s gun violence problem will not be solved at the level of platform policy...

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Pokémon Violet and Scarlet are launching in November

The next Pokémon adventure is launching on November 18th. Nintendo revealed the release date for Pokémon Violet and Scarlet, the next mainline entries in the series, through a new trailer today. The games were previously pegged to launch in the second half of 2022 for the Nintendo Switch. In addition to the release date, the trailer also shows off the new professors and some new pokémon, including a pair of legendaries, along with multiplayer support for up to four people.

Violet and Scarlet were first announced in February and are the latest attempts to shift the series to a more open-world structure, following 2019’s Sword and Shield and this year’s prequel Arceus. Nintendo describes the new games as an adventure where players “can...

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Buick is rebranding as an electric-only automaker

Photo: Buick

Buick, the iconic American automaker owned by General Motors, announced a raft of major changes meant to underscore its shift to electric vehicles.

The company says it will release its first EV for the North American market in 2024 and will only sell electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Its future EVs will bear the name “Electra” in a nod to the company’s past. It’s unveiling a new concept car, the Wildcat, that’s meant to tease its all-electric future. And it’s even updating its tri-shield logo, doing away with the circular design for a body-mounted horizontal display, to emphasize its “brand transformation.”

Buick is the last of the four vehicle brands owned by GM to unveil its electrification plans

Buick is the last of the...

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Microsoft’s compact Surface Laptop Go updated with 11th Gen Intel processor

The Surface Laptop Go 2. | Image: Microsoft

The most compact and affordable entry in Microsoft’s lineup of Surface Laptops — the Surface Laptop Go — is being updated with a newer chip as well as an “improved” webcam and thermals. The Surface Laptop Go 2 is powered by an 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor (up from 10th Gen in the previous model), with prices starting at $599.99 for a model with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

The original Surface Laptop Go was released in 2020 as Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Chromebooks. It had a lower starting price than the rest of the Surface Laptop lineup and a smaller 12.4-inch touch display that maintained Microsoft’s signature 3:2 aspect ratio (resolution sits at 1536 x 1024). Little of this has changed for its successor, which...

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MSI announces Titan GT77 with 4K screen and 250W of combined power

MSI’s Titan used to be the company’s highest-performance gaming notebook, rivaled only by desktop-adjacent devices like Alienware’s Area-51m in terms of performance and power. Such devices, while impressive, are a fairly niche product, and the company hasn’t refreshed the Titan line in a few years.

Today, at its MSIology press conference, the company announced that the Titan line is returning. It looks like the new Titan GT77 will be one of the most powerful gaming laptops you can buy this year (if not the most powerful one), including up to Intel’s desktop-class Core i9-12900HX and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, along with four slots for up to 128GB of DDR5-4800 RAM. The device will reach 250W of combined power delivery to the CPU and...

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Instagram puts Amber Alerts in your feed to help find abducted children

Amber Alerts are an important tool in helping locate abducted children. They’re authorized by law enforcement and broadcast via TVs, text messages, and other means. Now, Instagram will also push Amber Alerts into users’ feeds with the feature rolling out in the US today and set to be available in 25 total countries “in the next couple of weeks.” It shows how apps like Instagram have become basic communication infrastructure in the modern world.

Adding Amber Alerts to Instagram makes sense for a few reasons. First, younger generations may well ignore text messages but scroll through Instagram with some regularity. Second, while text alerts require people to click a link to get more information and photos of the missing child, Instagram’s...

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Slack adds audio name pronunciations to user profiles

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Getting to know your colleagues can be tricky when working remotely, but Slack is adding a handful of new features to its user profiles that should make things a little more fluid.

New features include the option to add name pronunciation guides (either by recording audio or adding phonetic spelling); a new pop-up user card UI that appears when you hover your mouse over someone’s name; and reorganized fields in user profiles, which have now been streamlined to three modules: Contact Info, People (where you sit in your company’s org chart), and About Me (customizable with things like languages spoken, start date, etc).

Here’s what that new UI looks like, with the full user profile card on the left and the pop-up card on the right:

...

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Elon Musk reportedly declares remote work ‘no longer acceptable’ at Tesla

Elon Musk at this year’s Met Gala. | Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a hardline stance against his employees working from home, Electrek and Bloomberg report. In an email apparently sent to the company’s executive staff with the subject line “Remote work is no longer acceptable,” the CEO said employees must spend a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office, or else “depart Tesla.” He said this should be a “main Tesla office,” and not a “remote branch office.”

Responding to a screenshot of the alleged email posted to Twitter, Musk did not deny its authenticity, and wrote that anyone who disagrees with a policy of coming into the office “should pretend to work somewhere else.” Tesla did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment, but is widely reported to have dissolved...

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Diablo Immortal skips Dutch and Belgian launches and loot boxes might be to blame

Diablo Immortal is the latest entry in the long running franchise. | Image: Activision Blizzard

Activision Blizzard has confirmed Diablo Immortal won’t be launching in Belgium and the Netherlands alongside other countries on June 2nd, and has blamed the territories’ “current operating environments” for preventing the release of its new free-to-play title, Eurogamer reports. The two countries are notable for recent rulings taken against loot boxes in games, with authorities in each country arguing that they constitute a form of gambling. The cancellation was first reported by Dutch news site Tweakers.

“Diablo Immortal will not be available in Belgium or the Netherlands, and will not appear on Battle.net or the Belgian and Netherlands App or Google Play Stores,” a spokesperson for the game’s publisher told Eurogamer. “This is related...

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